AlphaStation 500/266 ("ALCOR" )

  
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General Technical Information

HOSTNAME CENTAURI
SYSTEM CPU DEC ALPHA "EV5" 21164 @266 MHz
CACHE (3rd, 2nd and 1st D/I) 2 MB, 96 KB, 8 KB / 8 KB
RAM  128 MB, Rare but standard FPM PC-66 DIMMs (Max. 2 GB?)
SYSTEM BUS WIDTH 64 bit
SCSI BUS 1 x SCSI-2 Wide (20 MB/s) Qlogic QL1020 chip
OPTION BUS Standard PCI, one 64 bit wide, the rest 32 bit
GRAPHICS 3DLabs Permedia 2 chip, PCI, 8 MB Video RAM, 1280x1024 @75Hz max. resolution for 32-plane, 1600x1200 @75Hz max. resolution for 16-plane
HARD DISK DRIVE 9.1 GB 7200 RPM IBM U2W SCSI
CD-ROM DRIVE DEC RRD45 SCSI
NETWORK 10 Mbps RJ45 or BNC ethernet
OS Tru64 UNIX V5.1B
YEAR 1996
SPEED about 270 VAX MIPS
COMMENTS Both UNIX and Windows runs quite well on this machine. It's a High-End workstation computer that supported all OS's, Windows NT, UNIX and OpenVMS from the very beginning.
ESTIMATED PRICE '96 $25,000

History and other comments

This system was purchased from the company Tradec Networks Oy. I'm mentioning this here because one of the forground persons in Tradec has founded a museum in Helsinki, Finland for computer systems based on the famous Alpha CPU.

A thing worth mentioning is that this computer has three levels of CPU cache. The EV5 Alpha processor in itself has both L1 data + instruction cache as well as L2 cache. The L3 cache is off-chip, and therefore differently sized for different AlphaStations/AlphaServers.

I've tested a couple of operating systems on this machine: Tru64 UNIX,  NetBSD, Linux, Windows NT and even Windows 2000 RC1. All OS's run on it. I never tried OpenVMS on it before it was sold in the beginning of 2005.

I no longer own this computer.

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Last updated:  21-3-2005